Cisco Evolves Services Platform for Service Provider SDN

Cisco is continuing its march toward a fully programmable and agile networking architecture for service providers.

This week, Cisco announced its new Evolved Services Platform, part of the company's Open Networking Environment (ONE) first introduced in 2012.

Sanjeev Mervana, senior director of service provider marketing at Cisco, explained to Enterprise Networking Planet that in the three-layer Cisco ONE service provider architecture, the Cisco Evolved Services Platform is the middle layer, between the application and Cisco Evolved Programmable Network layers.

"It is a comprehensive unified virtualization and orchestration software platform that brings together compute, storage and network functions from the infrastructure layer and connects them seamlessly to applications running across multiple domains," Mervana said. "It represents a fundamental shift in the way service provider networks will be built."

Mervana added that the Evolved Services Platform will result in operational cost savings for service providers by way of advanced automation capabilities. Additionally, the platform offers the promise of new revenue-generating opportunities by enabling service providers to personalize services.

The goals of the Cisco Evolved Services Platform are delivery speed and agility. Mervana said that it enables providers to automatically create, provision and manage various different physical and virtual resources in real time.

"Without Cisco Evolved Services Platform, in the current mode of operations many of such steps are done well in advance to offer specific services, which requires service providers to do lot of upfront planning in design," Mervana said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.